Info PUSH Technology and PICS - an emerging issue

Bob Schloss - January 1997 - schloss@watson.ibm.com

Info PUSH is being developed to:

  1. maintain contact with a user without waiting for them to "visit once again a site" and without them "visiting again the site" to find that nothing is new
  2. reduce load on network by utilizing multicast

New protocols are being developed; not all Info PUSH is actually under-the-cover 'pull' using HTTP or NNTP or FTP; not all Info PUSH data has a well-defined "URL".

If PICS can't handle Info PUSH, some school systems are likely to ban information PUSH from their networks.

As new kinds of ISPs that do not require 'dial to connect' develop, such as Cable ISPs and Satellite ISPs become common, and as even low end PCs sport hard disks of 2G and more, expect Info PUSH to become almost as ubiquitous as the Web has become. Satellite, in particular, is a natural for multicast. Some metadata is needed, why shouldn't it be in PICS format?

In some cases, subscribing to a 'channel' 'topic' or 'subject' for an info push service is done by clicking on a link in a Web page whose URL returns a mime-type which invokes a special helper app that updates some daemon running on the client machine.

Some Info PUSH transmission protocols for dial-up and mobile connections are being developed which only use bandwidth when the user is not specifically getting content, so that they don't slow down interactive performance. (See BackWeb's "Polite" technology).

Ways InfoPUSH and PICS can work together

  1.  
  2. Rating of 'Channels'/'Subjects'
    1. upload of Profile so you don't see inappropriate channels
    2. failure when you attempt to 'register' for a channel
  3. Rating of Individual 'InfoPaks'
    LiquorTabaco 1 Sound 1 ConcernsLiveNetEventAtDateTime 199703041800
  4. Push technology as a way of distributing 1st party ratings
    Advantage: If user isn't using labels, they do not subscribe and they aren't sent
  5. Push technology as a way of distributing 3rd party ratings



Who is using Information push

  Polling/Daemon/Multicast Contacted Supporters Notes
PointCast Network Polling   Lotus. Microsoft Advertisements
Marimba CastaNet Polling   Apple, Netscape, Pointcast  
BackWeb Daemon   Lotus Advertisements
TIBCO TibNet Multicast Yes CISCO, Intermind, Sun, Cybercash, Informix, JavaSoft, Verisign LDAP
Wayfarer QuickCast        
Ifusioncom Arrive        
Diffusion IntraExpress       'Profiles'
CogniSoft InteliServ        
InCommon Downtown        

Usability Challenge

Users will not want to have to create a PICS profile, or import a PICS profile, into each of the several information push daemon programs installed on their system. If they change their profile, they don't want to have to do multiple imports to get the profile change active in all the applications. If the user installs a new push daemon, he/she could easily forget to import their filtering profile into it.

Therefore, it would be great if the desktop or OS software had an API permitting Info Push applications to get access to a common profile, and permitted a profile creation tool to use the API to get information about which daemons installed make use of the common profile. A rich API could invoke the profile evaluation subsystem, so that code doesn't have to be linked with each daemon. Bob has initial ideas about the interfaces and calls and parameters that this API could have. There are issues about reporting blocking of advertisements back to the publisher in the cases where unlimited blocking would make the information push service economically unsustainable.

Next Steps

W3C's PICS Development and Marketing Person (when available) should contact developers of Information Push.